Leonard, Garry. “A Little Trouble about Those White Corpuscles” Ulysses: Engendered Perspectives. Eds Kimberly Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum. UofSCP, 1999. 1-19.

“It is significant that Buck Muligan, who appears to be a man’s man (as the biography of Gogarty also attests), is shown parodying this ritual” (Leonard 3).

Mulligan dresses Stephen, urges him to show off for Haines, and insists on their special relationship . . . Stephen, to say the least, refuses to tap dance, but this particular dimension of their relationship highlights, from yet another angle, the constant emphasis in this chapter on the question: ‘How are we to make a man?’” (Leonard 4).

“In the early days of radio, broadcast signals ‘broke up’ with regularity, and the process of listening was one of constantly fiddling with the dial in a continuous effort to keep the signal whole and free from the ever-encroaching static (the aural equivalent of he watery inundation Stephen so devoutly fears)” (Leonard 4).

“In the twentieth century, we tune our ‘personality’ and focus our ‘style’ to create the coordinates that allow our corpuscles to assemble themselves into a separate, apparently autonomous, ‘individual’” (Leonard 4).

“Mulligan tries to package Stephen’s performance as ‘authentic Irish genius’ for Haines’s benefit” (Leonard 5).

“An Oxford education ‘packages’ an individual the way an advertising campaign packages a product” (Leonard 5).

“As Kimberly Devlin has observed, “It is worth noting how recurrently Joyce renders masculinity as an act, as something that is easily imitated” (Leonard 6).

“Stephen sees both himself and Mulligan as costumed performers, briefly becoming aware, as he does so, of the scripted relationship as the ‘stage Irishman” and his comically morose sidekick, both performing for the dubious prize of Haines’s befuddled appreciation” (Leonard 6).

“My primary assertion about “Telemachus” is that it presents a detailed display of modern masculinity in crisis . . . Almost by definition, self-consciousness, or self-reflection calls into question the originating of the self as a natural process, because such a process exposes as myth what has been relied upon by the “masculine” subject as pre-symbolic fact” (Leonard 6).

“Typically, men are too busily (and anxiously) remaining unaware of the performative dimension of their ‘masculine identity’ to notice or critique the masquerade of other men, and this is an important difference between the ‘masculine’ masquerade and the ‘feminine’ one. Since femininity is self-consciously performative, women critique other women, and, depending on how much is at stake, they do so passionately or dispassionately. Bloom notes this critique and thinks it is mean, while Molly sees it as a basic survival skill” (Leonard 8).

“More generally my approach to the chapter is informed by the Lacanian assumption that there is no foundational basis to identity, an assumption I outlined in my book on Dubliners: ‘There is no organized ‘self’ serenely present behind the masque of ‘meaning’ and the mask of ‘identity.’ Instead, we perform masques because the alternative is to have not sense of destiny at all; we wear masks to keep intact the illusion that behind them we have a ‘real’ face that must be preserved’” (Leonard 6).

“In this essay, however, I focus on the masquerade of masculinity, a masquerade, as ‘Telemachus’ makes clear, with traditions and paradoxes of its own, distinct from the more consciously playful masquerade of ‘femininity,’ and one that is undergoing—as modern sensibility, in all its vicissitudes, becomes more and more self-conscious—a historically specific period of crisis” (Leonard 6-7).

“Despite its overdetermined construction, and in distinct contrast to the ‘feminine’ self, the ‘masculine’ self must masquerade as an autonomous, authoritative, and substantive being” (Leonard 7).

“The ‘masculine’ self must appear timeless (as ‘reality) in a timely manner (or ‘style’)” (Leonard 7).

“As Lacan has pointed out, the paradox of performing ‘masculinity’ is that any excessive projection of and insistence upon one’s virility risks drawing attention to the usually obscured apparatus of its own production; in other words, a display of ‘masculinity’ calls attention to its derivative status as an effect of performance, rather than, as it purports to be, an expression of a prediscursive, supposedly essential, ‘nature.’” (Leonard 7).


“In other words, if one overacts ‘masculine,’ one appears ‘feminine.’ In order for ‘masculinity’ to be culturally intelligible, it must be performed, which means all presentations of the self, coded as ‘masculine,’ are potentially decoded as performative, and therefore, ‘feminine.’ Masculinity, in other words, is always in crisis, crisis that must be denied even as it is being endured” (Leonard 7).

“it is their feigned indifference to the camera that makes them photogenic” (Leonard 8).

“Carole-Anne Tyler has remarked that camp, from a performative perspective, and not from the perspective of sexual orientation, is about ‘catching gender in the act—as an act—so as to demonstrate there is no natural, essential, biological basis to gender identity or sexual orientation” (Leonard 9-10).

“By presenting ‘masculinity’ as a historical construct, one with outmoded styles, preposterous styles, and ‘campy’ composites of both, Joyce successfully fractures the presumed naturalness of gender roles and reveals the hidden labor of producing and maintaining a culturally intelligible image of masculinity. The labor of ‘femininity’ has been exteriorized in the advertising of Joyce’s time through makeup rituals and beauty tips, as evidenced in ‘Nausicaa,’ but ‘masculinity’ still preserves the myth of naturalness that is not the result of effort” (Leonard 10-11).

“As I have already shown, there are several ‘styles’ of masculinity presented in this chapter, and Joyce suggests this through an implied history of men’s ‘style,’ which is really a survey of ways to perform ‘masculinity’” (Leonard 11).

“Buck Mulligan’s performance of masculinity has been noticed by Kimberly Devlin (“Buck Mulligan illustrates the precariousness of masculine gender act”), but I would take this a step further and suggest that Ulysses takes as a central project all identity as an act” (Leonard 13).

“Viewed from a disinterested anthropological perspective (thatis, with questions of sacredness and belief set to the side), this process of converting ordinary bread and wine into “body and blood” is a ritual that “makes” a man/God out of the disparate elements” (Leonard 2).

“Dressing up ‘in style,’ in this sense, can be seen as converting the available symbols of ‘masculinity’ into the body and blood of ‘a man.’ Whereas women transform themselves into images of ‘Women’ (that is, the feminine), men transubstantiate themselves into images of “Men” (that is, the masculine). ‘Femininity’ converts into form, ‘masculinity’ into substance. Another of several differences between the two actions is this: labor which produces ‘femininity’ is coded as trivial and artificial, while labor which produces ‘masculinity’ is coded as sacred and natural” (Leonard 12).

“Mass is an ancient ritual by which men celebrate their ability to bestow ‘masculinity’ (an, by extension, legitimacy and authority) upon other men; a woman on the alter, then, would be, no matter what she wore or did, a man in drag” (Leonard 12).

“As a result, like the concept of transubstantiation in particular, or substantiation in general, the ‘masculine’ subject is always in a state of imperfectly understood crisis, and dependent on faith (or suspended disbelief) in a way the ‘feminine’ subject is not (where the assumption of performativity is already acknowledged); a heretic is nothing more or less than someone with an accurate understanding of this crisis, and a disturbing willingness to explore it” (Leonard 13).